@aldus & balrick: vcd is hosed on stand alone (jvc s40bk)as well as pc. have tried encoding using pal templates with tmpgenc, ntsc templates, increased audio bitrate to 48k to match the source, have used vdub to feed seperate wav file into tmpgenc, using both a decompressed_pcm and original avi for souce video. NO GO!

i have never met a movie that has given me so much grief.